


Protective Instincts

by TheWoodburn



Series: Of Feathers and Ash [3]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Red Hood - Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-06
Updated: 2017-03-06
Packaged: 2018-09-28 17:03:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10140614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWoodburn/pseuds/TheWoodburn
Summary: The air was sharp and clear, one of the few benefits of the evacuation and reducing temperature, the centuries-old odor of industry and modern life frozen and discarded, leaving a crispness previously only found among the peaks of mountain ranges. On the far side of the alley they stood in stood the ruins of buildings, where the riots had been particularly bad and the fires that followed were allowed to rage out of control. It had taken weeks for the conflagration to finally die, leaving behind soot-blackened husks of buildings, grotesque sculptures of melted glass and metal and more dead than anyone ever cared to count. Every mask native to Gotham and a few that weren't had been called in to help find and recapture Joker and Scarecrow who had started the mess. Dick had been looking forward to a full night's sleep for once after days of being run ragged at all hours.





	

She's done it before – turned all her emotions off. Opened herself up to nothing but stimuli, logic, and strategy. It's what she does when she need to focus, when she needs to shut everything off and win the damn fight before anything truly bad happens.

She knows it would make her a thousand times more efficient – all those mistakes and split seconds of doubt and vulnerability, gone.

And she knows she can do it. It's always there, that knowledge that she could just throw it all away and it wouldn't ever hurt again.

But she won't do it.

She knows that if she crosses that line, if she cuts those things off -

She won't be stable anymore. And frankly, the only thing she have going for herself is her ability to feel things deeper than humans ever could. She has always been too much for this world. She knows it, everyone knows it.

She'd do stupid, stupid things for the people she loves. And every time someone goes away she breaks just a little bit more. She recognize this downward spiral and she can't do anything to stop it.

Sometimes she looks at herself in the mirror and laughs. She's turned into the person she swore she never would be. Looking back, she also sees herself as naïve, stupid, foolish. An idiot.

Looking forward, she sees herself as cold, volatile, a hazard.

She gripped the rim of the porcelain sink and tried to steady her hands.

  
"One last time," she whispered to herself.

  
One. Last. Time.

All the points of her life have brought her to this and she wouldn't change a single damn thing. So she breathes in and turns it all off.

She feels a disconnect and she feels hate that burns her throat so much that she screams. It helps with the cold that seems to come out of her bones and make the air frost and chill around her. Her skin is very, very cold. She can feel the frost decorating it. Her power scares her, sometimes. But then she remembers not to be afraid because it's everyone else who should be afraid, now. Out of that crack that lies deep inside if her crawls forth a darkness more cold than the light of the stars. Its almost sudden when it freezes her heart and turns her blood to slush. Her breath is frost so every exhale leads to new patterns painted in fleeting lines.

She laughs and she don't recognize her voice anymore.

That's okay.

No one knows what it's supposed to sound like, anyway.

—  
One moment, Dick was in the soft blackness of sleep, dreaming of nothing in particular. The next, he was tied down to a machine linked to his heart. All the while he could hear Bruce begging him not to go not to die.

But no matter how he struggled against the ropes that held him down, no matter how hard he struggled, Dick couldn't escape.

He don’t know how long he was trapped there in that dream world, in his own horrible memories, before he managed to jerk himself awake. All he could think about was the pain. Then, suddenly, he was sitting bolt upright, heart pounding, breath coming in short, ragged gasps, Damian looking down at him with a cracked mask of indifference. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Tim hovering and Bruce melding with the shadows. Dick reaches out to touch Damian's shoulder, a reassuring touch that Damian himself would never admit to needing.

The air was sharp and clear, one of the few benefits of the evacuation and reducing temperature, the centuries-old odor of industry and modern life frozen and discarded, leaving a crispness previously only found among the peaks of mountain ranges. On the far side of the alley they stood in stood the ruins of buildings, where the riots had been particularly bad and the fires that followed were allowed to rage out of control. It had taken weeks for the conflagration to finally die, leaving behind soot-blackened husks of buildings, grotesque sculptures of melted glass and metal and more dead than anyone ever cared to count. Every mask native to Gotham and a few that weren't had been called in to help find and recapture Joker and Scarecrow who had started the mess. Dick had been looking forward to a full night's sleep for once after days of being run ragged at all hours.

Tim, poor quiet Tim who had already lost so much and who Dick had, unknowingly at the time, driven a canyon sized wedge in between them, spoke up. "Everyone's here and awake. Will you tell us what you want now?"

Dick opened his mouth to ask who he was talking to when Damian, who had glued himself to Dick's side, pointed at the roof of the end building of the alley.

He turns and wonders if it is a new Rogue or a demon or something in between.

He does not expect the woman. But all it really takes is one look.

She is – in simple words, a predator.

Watching, luminous eyes and tilting head and unruffled stillness. So much like Cassandra but at the same time, not. Looking closer she looks strange. The kind of strange that is neither beautiful nor hideous. The kind of strange that's intriguing and enrapturing.

It's in the flawlessness of her skin, the paleness and the smoothness of it. It's also in the darkness of her hair that doesn't seem to reflect light, and the brilliant spring green of her slanted eyes. It's the sharp angles of her face. How she seems to be a part of the night sky, rather than backed by it.

She feels wrong. She doesn't feel human, she doesn't feel like anything or anyone he's ever met. Dick doesn't know if he should be more cautious or not.

And she said to him, in a voice that was deep and hollow, young and old, "Indeed. Please take a seat. Our business will be short, and violence free."

Dick looks at her harder after exchanging a look with Tim. "There....are no chairs." He pointed out, hoping to focus her attention onto him.

A faint expression of perplexmxent drifted across her face like a cloud across the sky before realization dawned.

"I had forgotten how...limited your kind can be. Please pardon my lapse." The woman stated, something like an apology in her tone. Her words made Dicks skin crawl, and he gripped Damian's bristling shoulder. Her words, even with an apologetic tone were still meant to wound like a honeyed thorn. In a fluid movement she slipped off the edge of the roof letting her arms rise above her shoulders as she fell. As she brought her arms back down to her sides in sweeping arcs, her descent slowed until her bare feet touched the ground with no more weight than a feather would.

And she becomes....more. A inverted crown of paper thin ice that drips down her hair in glittering stones of unimaginable beauty. Obsidian hair brushes the icy ground, more shadow-dark than hair has any right to be. Porcelain white skin is decorated with touches of winter frost and sharp scrolling lines that make a mockery of jewelry, and blend into a dress of frozen night. Ice is crusted like a thick cut of diamonds on her throat and wrists.

The air stills and the ground under their feet crackles as ice forms, thin and delicate. Points move up, up, up, twirling and lending themselves to the creation of...a chair? By the time the world has stilled four simple chairs made of indescribable ice oppose one which is something more throne than seat. Thin white flakes of pure stinging snow drift from above, softening the sharp cruelty this alley of ice represents. It was winter- cold and snow and ice and naked trees and leaden clouds and stinging wind.

This creature of biting chill waves a flawless hand at the chairs. "Please."

We sat. She was so clearly inhuman that Dick feared fighting her. They would end up cold, and wet, and miserable.

Brave Tim is the first of us to attempt to speak. "You say you have business with us." It was more question than statement, and the creature grins at him over the top of a ice-blue teacup. As she lowers it to speak Dick could swear he sees stars glimmer from the black liquid it contains.

"My wish is merely to convey a message to you. That is all." Her voice is soft like the new fallen snow.

Bruce picks this moment to speak. "Who's pawn are you?" Names aren't really relevant unless she decides to become an enemy.

Her face hardens and her voice cuts like a knife. "I'd kill a thousand men before I let one make me his slave."

Bruce's lips thin, and Dick wants to tell him to let Tim handle this, to let Tim with his careful words and soothing actions handle her.

The woman breathes out heavily and Dick sees frost in the air. "This message comes from me myself and no other. Remember that."

A moment passes. “What you need to know is that I’ll get rid of anything, and anyone, who poses a threat to him, even if it means I forfeit your lives." She said, and there was biting anger in those words . . . and something older, richer, darker.

Sheer terror racing through Dick's bloodstream, his heart heavy with the knowledge that he was helpless to stop her.

She goes on, headless to Dick's fear. "You will know him by eyes of stone, the anger woven into his being. This will be my only warning." A sip from the teacup as she waits for us to process her declaration.

In a sudden movement Bruce stands and Dick is half out of his chair before he realizes it. "If this grey eyed man commits a crime than we will have no choice but to bring him in. Justice will be upheld." She closed her eyes.

And there was a crack inside his head, as if thunder cleaved through him.  
As she opened her eyes, he realized it wasn’t thunder—but the sound of a door slamming open.  
Her face turned expressionless. Cold as the gaps between the stars. And her eyes…  
Spring green burned bright … around a core of silver. No hint of a pupil to be found.

“That’s not human,” Tim breathed.

A faint smile blossomed on her full mouth, born of cruelty and arrogance, and she examined them, watching their reaction to her next words. "Very nobel, Cerberus of Gotham. However, the moment you come after him you will have to wade through rivers of blood that will not be my own to win that war."

A finger of her uncurled hand points at Damian who has adopted a volatile stance. "Go on little puppy and bear your teeth at me. I'll pull them out one by one." Her point is driven home when the creature that stared out through the womans eyes furled her fingers into a fist. Light leaked through her clenched fingers. Slowly, carefully, she unfurled them.  
Cold dark light. Tendrils flickered—silver flame…  
Diana, when he had been younger had told him tales about myths and the weapons those myths had wielded. She had spoken of how fire was not just hot. How there was fire like winter borns from shadows. And he realized that the flame she would unleash would be so cold it burned, realized it was the cold of the stars, the cold of stolen light. Not wildfire—but moonfire. A fire like ice, fire stolen from the stars—

The woman flicked her hand, the fire vanishing. Dick collapsed back into his chair.

She was more than this world has the capacity to understand, more then he could understand. Ice and shadow and death and power thats what she was. Which only made her threat that much more terrifying because if she came after them...he didn't think they could stop her. It was more than even his family could handle, her power.

"You already know how this will end. The question is, how will it begin?" Her words hold a tone of finality.

  
She looks at them and maybe she smiles or maybe she frowns or maybe she blinks. But then she's gone and the air tastes like sweet, sweet decay in his mouth and his heart hurts. They are standing and all the ice thaws, melting away as if it never existed.

The world resumes.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
